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Publius 1,613

...You'll be overwhelmed by reviews.... Yeah I know you can limit daily reviews, but you're simply delaying them. If you put off reviewing, say, half of the due cards, what's the point using an SRS at all? That feature was designed to allow people who skipped a day or two to catch up when they get back, not the way you intend to use it.

Unfortunately the important number is 'days spent learning' and if you increase 'new words per day' too much you'll burn out and 'days spent learning' will drop to 0 along with 'total words learnt'.

Don't push yourself to try and do as many reviews possible. Rather, choose a number that is sustainable day-in, day-out.

I'd also be concerned about reviews becoming overwhelming. If you are sure this is something you want to do, increase it slowly, maybe 10 words at a time every 2 weeks once you find the reviews are still manageable. It's easy to suddenly find yourself overwhelmed with reviews.

Also keep in mind that learning more words a day means learning each word less well. Everyone has a fixed amount of time to spend per day learning. Say you have 2 hours and you are trying to learn 50 words. That's about 2 and a half minutes per word. If you increase it to 100, you now have 2 hours to learn 100 words, leaving you 1 minute and 12 seconds per word. Now maybe you have more time or less time to learn these words, but the principle still holds if you increase the number of words you are decreasing the amount of time you can devote per word.

If you are trying to maximize the number of words learnt there's a trade off for quality of knowing the word, and that will trend towards the bare minimum required to successfully pass an Anki review. Unfortunately passing a review isn't the same as being able to use and understand the word in a real life situation, so what this means is if you maximize words learnt per day you'll find that even though your Anki numbers are going up, your ability won't actually be improving (because a large number of the words have only been learnt to pass an Anki review rather than being learnt actually use them).

You will almost always be better spending more time improving the quality of knowing the words you are adding rather than increasing the quantity of words learnt.

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davoosh 58

I wrote about this on the form a while back. I came to the conclusion that I'm better off spending time reading/listening in place of Anki time, even if only a few paragraphs or 5 minutes worth of listening. Learning 'out of context' going through endless lists of reviews sapped my motivation and I found I was barely able to actually use any of what I had 'learnt'...